340 Yards With An AR
I will admit up front I don't feel like my shooting skills are where they should be. It's in large part due to lack of practice. That's my fault. But other things (work, family, other worthwhile interests and hobbies) can get in the way.
So I've make a shift in my strategy towards training in the last few months which seems to be working. If there's something I really want to learn or if I've identified some short comings in a skill set, I seek out one on one training. Classes are great for a whole host of reasons, but I'm at a time in my life now where I'd rather spend a few extra bucks for personalized training to help me get up to speed faster than attending multiple classes to try to glean what I need to know.
Given that, I took Friday off and spent the day with Kenan Flasowski, the owner of FAST, Inc. From his bio, you can see he has a wealth of experience from which he draws. And he does so without coming across as somebody who wants to convince you he's the baddest kid in the cul de sac.
I'd trained with him once before with a group of friends, but I wanted to really immerse myself into training with the AR-15 in a way that would address my specific shortcomings. And within a few hours, he had me consistently hitting man sized targets with iron sights at distances out to 340 yards.
I will admit I didn't think I had it in me to be able to do that, but a) I'm probably being a bit hard on myself and b) the technology of weapons and ammo nowadays is to a point where you can take an out of the box rifle with a 16 inch barrel and do quite well, provided you understand the ballistics.
The one thing that stuck out as perhaps going against some of the conventional wisdom was the idea of zeroing the rifle at 100 yards, rather than at 50 yards. Kenan came up with some data after my last year's group had a rather lengthy discussion with him regarding the best distance to zero if you're going to be using the rifle for home defense purposes (and thus taking shots at shorter distances.)
Without geeking out too much here, the conclusion he reached was that a zero at 100 yards using standard 55 grain ammo would require no more than a two inch hold over for any distance between 15 and 200 yards. Put another way, the bullet will not travel above the line of sight at any point in the trajectory for a 100 yard zero. As a result, memorizing the hold overs at the various distances becomes easy....in part because a) it's never more than two inches and b) there are no "hold unders" so to speak.
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